Barry Libenson, CIO of Global Technology at Experian, recently came onto my podcast show. He has a continuous track record of huge success in the CIO capacity and is currently responsible for the design and delivery of global technology strategy at Experian.

Here are some very practical and usable suggestions discussed in this segment. 

• Re-Use of Code
• Follow Agile Principles
• Embrace Micro services & API Calls
• The ability to Decouple your legacy environment into reusable code that may be legacy by nature, but it can by wrapped effectively with an API layer or with a set of micro services so that the logic doesn’t necessarily need to be rewritten, but it can be called as a module, and be embedded in some other application.

Watch this short video from the podcast as Barry speaks with me about CIO Offense and Defense Strategy for a World Class company.  I want you to understand what keeps a top CIO up at night and what he is doing about it.

Bill Murphy hosts a popular RedZone Podcast, where he interviews leaders who inspire him in the areas of Exponential Technologies, Business Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Thought Leadership, Enterprise IT Security, Neuroscience, and more.

As the CEO of RedZone Technologies Bill is responsible for the vision and direction of the company and has guided the company to a leadership position in Enterprise Cybersecurity and IT Managed Services. In this quickly evolving environment, his leadership has made RedZone Technologies an avenue for innovative solutions, while remaining a dependable and reliable partner in the face of rapidly changing technologies and threats. The success of this vision has also meant consistently delivering on promises made, and earning customers’ lifelong loyalty.

RedZone Technologies’ goal is to help businesses secure their networks and keep their data safe. RedZone can help you minimize risk. Contact our team today: (410) 897-9494 | rzsales@redzonetech.net.

The full transcript of this conversation can be found below:

Bill:         If you were forming a startup today, what kind of a team would you need to really, like at a small innovation scale, so that a CIO can say, okay, these the minimum skill sets I need to be able to run an environment like you’re running today? I know you’re running across thousands of people, but what are the key major roles that you need to pull this off so you’re confident?

Barry:    You hit on something I think that’s really an important point, which is that the world is really changed in terms of how software is built, and it used to be that you would sit at a terminal or a machine and you’d bang out line after line of code and you were really responsible almost from the ground up, to engineer and to architect a solution.

I think one of the most important aspects in this day and age in software development is flexible thinking, and finding people that don’t sort of suffer from a not-invented-here syndrome, and are willing… it’s hard to get a really smart engineer sometimes to embrace the reuse of a piece of code that they didn’t necessarily write, or to use a micro service or API call that wasn’t created by them or their organization.

And I think that the generation of engineers that you’re really looking for are individuals who are more focused on innovation and getting product out the door and understand sort of agile software development and the need to basically constantly be adding value versus the old school style of software development which was writing prolific amounts of code and debugging it on a regular basis.

It really is a pretty significant paradigm shift in terms of how software and applications are developed today versus the way it was done 20 years ago. Finding individuals who can embrace those kinds of models and sort of think that way is critically important to building out any kind of a development organization these days. It’s really about learning how and knowing how to effectively put pieces of technology together more than it is, in many cases, about writing those baseline pieces of technology.

Bill:         When you took over, Barry, in your current role, did you… I run an innovation group in D.C. and North Carolina for my CIOs in the group, and we had a micro services presenter come in and it gave me an interesting thinking. I thought that micro services was sort of a ground-up strategy of building software, but then he said, well, often he’s stripping layers out of legacy systems and building it in portable modules versus having a $25 million software project in the old legacy model. He’s taking legacy systems and kind of stripping them out into services. Did you have that type of environment, or were you building everything from the ground up?

Barry:    No, I can really relate to that actually. I think almost any organization where part of their portfolio would be considered legacy has dealt with a similar type of challenge which is sort of the need to transition from what I would call a legacy environment to a more modern architecture, and typically that can mean a number of different things including a dual operating environment. Or, it may be that there are some reusable code that may be legacy by nature, but it can by wrapped effectively with an API layer or with a set of micro services so that the logic doesn’t necessarily need to be rewritten, but it can be called as a module, and be embedded in some other application.

We actually have seen a lot of that. Most of the major bureaus including ourselves and a lot of large financial services organizations still have a handful of mainframes that they may be operating on. While those [inaudible] are incredibly reliable and they scale very effectively, they’re very proprietary and very closed environments. But, moving off of a full legacy mainframe environment is typically a multi-year project, and in many cases there are chunks of code that may exist in that environment, and in our case that was in fact true, we did what we call a heavy amount of what’s known as pinning on the mainframes. Pinning is the process of associating a data element with an individual in our case.

People may say, “Well, why don’t you just use Social Security number?” We actually intentionally don’t use things like Social Security numbers for security reasons, and because we want an even more unique identifier. So all of that pinning logic has historically been run in a mainframe environment. We basically took all of that pinning logic and turned it into micro services, moved it off of the mainframe in order to reduce our dependency on the mainframe, and it also allowed us to begin the process of eliminating that legacy footprint and sort of gave us a solution in the interim to doing that.

Yes, I can very much relate to sort of the encapsulation of some legacy code and the wrapping of things. I think it really falls into both categories. For us, it’s a mixed boat, we do a fair share of creating new entry points and new micro services based on our newer platforms, but we also do a fair amount of encapsulation of some of the older services so that they can be shared or more easily reused, or be part of a migration process down the road.

Bill:         Yes, I think that’s great and I know there are a lot of entrepreneurs listening and CIOs that I think that it’s great to get your feedback on that because you’re so far in front of a lot of folks there.

If you were forming a startup today, what kind of a team would you need to really, like at a small innovation scale, so that a CIO can say, okay, these the minimum skill sets I need to be able to run an environment like you’re running today? I know you’re running across thousands of people, but what are the key major roles that you need to pull this off so you’re confident?

Barry:    You hit on something I think there that’s really an important point, which is that the world is really changed in terms of how software is built, and it used to be that you would sit at a terminal or a machine and you’d bang out line after line of code and you were really responsible almost from the ground up, to engineer and to architect a solution.

I think one of the most important aspects in this day and age in software development is flexible thinking, and finding people that don’t sort of suffer from a not-invented-here syndrome, and are willing… it’s hard to get a really smart engineer sometimes to embrace the reuse of a piece of code that they didn’t necessarily write, or to use a micro service or API call that wasn’t created by them or their organization.

And I think that the generation of engineers that you’re really looking for are individuals who are more focused on innovation and getting product out the door and understand sort of agile software development and the need to basically constantly be adding value versus the old school style of software development which was writing prolific amounts of code and debugging it on a regular basis.

It really is a pretty significant paradigm shift in terms of how software and applications are developed today versus the way it was done 20 years ago. Finding individuals who can embrace those kinds of models and sort of think that way is critically important to building out any kind of a development organization these days. It’s really about learning how and knowing how to effectively put pieces of technology together more than it is, in many cases, about writing those baseline pieces of technology.

Bill:         When you took over, Barry, in your current role, did you… I run an innovation group in D.C. and North Carolina for my CIOs in the group, and we had a micro services presenter come in and it gave me an interesting thinking. I thought that micro services was sort of a ground-up strategy of building software, but then he said, well, often he’s stripping layers out of legacy systems and building it in portable modules versus having a $25 million software project in the old legacy model. He’s taking legacy systems and kind of stripping them out into services. Did you have that type of environment, or were you building everything from the ground up?

Barry:    No, I can really relate to that actually. I think almost any organization where part of their portfolio would be considered legacy has dealt with a similar type of challenge which is sort of the need to transition from what I would call a legacy environment to a more modern architecture, and typically that can mean a number of different things including a dual operating environment. Or, it may be that there are some reusable code that may be legacy by nature, but it can by wrapped effectively with an API layer or with a set of micro services so that the logic doesn’t necessarily need to be rewritten, but it can be called as a module, and be embedded in some other application.

We actually have seen a lot of that. Most of the major bureaus including ourselves and a lot of large financial services organizations still have a handful of mainframes that they may be operating on. While those [inaudible] are incredibly reliable and they scale very effectively, they’re very proprietary and very closed environments. But, moving off of a full legacy mainframe environment is typically a multi-year project, and in many cases there are chunks of code that may exist in that environment, and in our case that was in fact true, we did what we call a heavy amount of what’s known as pinning on the mainframes. Pinning is the process of associating a data element with an individual in our case.

People may say, “Well, why don’t you just use Social Security number?” We actually intentionally don’t use things like Social Security numbers for security reasons, and because we want an even more unique identifier. So all of that pinning logic has historically been run in a mainframe environment. We basically took all of that pinning logic and turned it into micro services, moved it off of the mainframe in order to reduce our dependency on the mainframe, and it also allowed us to begin the process of eliminating that legacy footprint and sort of gave us a solution in the interim to doing that.

Sure, I can very much relate to sort of the encapsulation of some legacy code and the wrapping of things. I think it really falls into both categories. For us, it’s a mixed boat, we do a fair share of creating new entry points and new micro services based on our newer platforms, but we also do a fair amount of encapsulation of some of the older services so that they can be shared or more easily reused, or be part of a migration process down the road.

Bill:         Yes, I think that’s great and I know there are a lot of entrepreneurs listening and CIOs that I think that it’s great to get your feedback on that because you’re so far in front of a lot of folks there.

Bill Murphy is the CEO of RedZone Technologies. Responsible for the vision and direction of the company, Bill has guided the company to a leadership position in Enterprise Cybersecurity and IT Managed Services. In this quickly evolving environment, his leadership has made RedZone Technologies an avenue for innovative solutions, while remaining a dependable and reliable partner in the face of rapidly changing technologies and threats. The success of this vision has also meant consistently delivering on promises made, and earning customers’ lifelong loyalty.

RedZone Technologies’ goal is to help businesses secure their networks and keep their data safe. RedZone can help you minimize risk. Contact our team today: (410) 897-9494 | rzsales@redzonetech.net.